Greg Storey of Airbag takes a whack at redesigning the now notorious presidential intelligence brief. He takes a document that was once unreadable and unclear and transforms it into a page of lucid communication. Thank you, Greg — with this single exercise, you prove the importance of good typography.
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Good typography? I dunno — the orange square is nice and all, but those sure are terrible rags!
The rag is the last thing you can be anal about in a template. That content will be filled by the users of the template, all of whom surely don’t give a fig about typography. This proof of concept is all about the organization and hierarchy of information.
Heh, it was a joke — just a sarcastic stoodent mouthing off. Sadly though (not joking), Bush almost never sees his briefings, or indeed the news of the day — CIA Director Tenet usually reads aloud to him, though he wasn’t present on the ranch for this particular briefing. Good typography can’t function without reading, I imagine.
I’m not so sure about this… replacing Univers with Frutiger is such a bold move, isn’t that taking it too far?
:-P
I wish this particular PDB could be shown next to a list of every other person/group “determined to strike inside the US.” Six months ago the Left was shrieking about how wrong it was to preďż˝mptively strike Iraq, now they’re inisting we failed in not striking bin Laden in advance. Have/eat. Fucking choose.
John, you were wrong. Admit it; move on.
hhp
Please try to restrict your comments here to design and type only.
Stephen, maybe Hrant meant that John was wrong about the font. Its Myriad, not Frutiger. Thats on topic!
Good on you, Grobbins.
I’m going to nit-pick because I’ve seen this on a number of design blogs now. I would have thought that the entirety of the United States populace knew how to spell Usama [sic].
And let’s not talk about agressor [sic].
Even when you consider that 10% of US high-school students can’t find the US on the world map?
hhp
Chris, it’s not a misspelling. It depends on what system of transliteration you choose. Such choices often carry political overtones whether you want them to or not, e.g. Pinyin vs. Wade Giles for Chinese.
So both “Osama” and “Usama” are valid according to different transliterations, I’m almost positive. That’s why you’ll see it both ways. I don’t know what the different alternatives for Arabic are called, but I know there’s more than one.
Of course every transliteration is a compromise… my name written in Katakana is pronounced “Batura,” which is one of the rare cases where the transliteration sounds cooler.
Using the Graphite rendering engine, you can actually build transliterators into fonts.
> I don�t know what the different
> alternatives for Arabic are called
What do you mean? The guy’s name is spelled one way – Arabic is highly phonetic – you won’t get “Deborrah” being pronounced “Debra”, or “Worchester” as “Wooster” for example.
BTW, my brother’s name has five letters, and only one of them is available in Arabic! Worse: I had a dog in Beirut, and his name when attempted by an Arabic-only speaker sounded a lot like “foreskin”… Which was kind of appropriate, actually, considering his behavior with people in shorts.
hhp